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The silent majority

Global health and early life course scholars were too quiet during Covid, showing the broken incentives in academics

By Vinay Prasad | March 5, 2022

Of course, some academics were notably vocal during COVID19, taking the thesis position– lockdown, school closure, masking, temperature checks– or the antithesis– that these interventions don’t work or did more harm than good. But notably most academics were silent.

I understand why laboratory scientists might have stayed out of it, but two groups puzzle me: global health advocates and early life course/ disparities researchers who were quiet.

Lockdowns might ultimately be the single most destabilizing event in the last 25 years globally. Leading to famine and extreme poverty like we have never seen in modern times. Oxfam warned last summer that 11 people die each minute from hunger, outpacing covid.

A generation of kids have lost their future. UNICEF reported in March 2021 that 168 million kids lost a year of school, and many lost more.

India faced some of the longest closures, mortgaging the future of tens of millions of kids, leading to catastrophic educational losses.

School closures in the USA were disproportionately in liberal strongholds and attitudes were temporaly linked to Trump’s advocacy. Closing school for more than a year is the greatest domestic policy failure of the last 25 years. As a lifelong Democrat/ progressive, I know with confidence that my team is responsible for this.

Yet, throughout this pandemic, notice how many global health scholars were totally silent on lockdowns. How many global health researchers said nothing as India sacrificed the future of a generation with school closures? How many US based disparity researchers or early childhood advocates were silent on school closure? I believe most were quiet!

Why?

The answer is simple: they are more committed to their career than they are to the cause. It is a professional liability to take a strong stand on a controversial issue. It can lead to professional repercussions. Being silent is safe. At the same time, the single most consequential decision of one’s lifetime was taking place on topics these people supposedly care about, but they were silent. Instead, they continued their, by perspective, trivial work.

This criticism is particularly relevant for global health reseachers. For years, I have felt that some spend their lives flying to Europe to attend cocktail parties and lavish conferences, praising themselves for their virtue, while the globe stagnates in economic hegemony, and the average person’s health in a low or middle income nation is unchanged. It feels like empty rhetoric, and this was on full display with COVID. Most were totally silent on lockdowns.

Part of the barrier is the Academy, which is meant to promote vibrant thought, has become a monoculture of groupthink. Everyone cares about diversity, but on school closures– a form of structural racism– they were all silent. Everyone cares about the poor, but is happy to put their own child in a school pod, while poor kids get a zoom education. Perhaps some of these people lacked professional support or protection to speak against the (perceived) mob, but others may have merely lacked courage, or as is human nature, chosen selfishness.

At the end of the day, covid policy was dominated by idiots, people lacking a self preservation instinct, and a few courageous souls. Sometimes, however, it was hard to tell who was who. But most of all we missed the voices that should have been active. They were silent. They let me down, but also a few hundred million children. I hope they enjoy their promotions.

March 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

‘Truly Frightening:’ Feds Give Tech Companies Until May 2 to ‘Turn Over COVID-19 Misinformation’

By Meryl Nass, M.D. | The Defender | March 4, 2022

Two news stories this week reveal how the federal government plans to treat COVID “misinformation” as a crime, and what role tech companies will play in rounding up the “criminal.”

This is truly frightening.

Two U.S. Senators this week introduced a bill to provide tech companies cover via legislation that could make it possible for Congress to “legalize” censorship and criminalize First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.

Here’s a press release describing the bill:

“U.S. Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), both members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, on Wednesday introduced legislation to counter the threat that misinformation and disinformation pose to public health as evidenced by the widespread false narratives throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Promoting Public Health Information Act would support efforts across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and with outside stakeholders to communicate effectively during a public health emergency and address health misinformation.”

Here is what Murphy had to say about the bill:

“Throughout this pandemic, the impact of misinformation has been devastating. Rumors and conspiracy theories about the efficacy of masking or the safety of vaccines still run rampant on social media and have caused thousands of deaths that could have been prevented.

“This legislation will help us get smart about how to tackle misinformation and effectively promote science-based health information, especially as we continue fighting COVID-19 and prepare for future public health emergencies.”

In other words, the feds are asking detailed information about the demographics “exposed to misinformation,” allowing them to determine who’s reading what, and to obtain their names.

Next, in the last paragraph of this New York Times article, “The surgeon general calls on Big Tech to turn over Covid-19 misinformation data,” we learn that the federal government wants citizens to start “sharing” information on “misinformation:”

“‘We’re asking anyone with relevant insights — from original research and data sets to personal stories that speak to the role of misinformation in public health — to share them with us,’ Dr. [Vivek] Murthy said.”

Isn’t that sweet?

This is how they dress up the Stasi in 21st-century euphemism to encourage ratting out your friends and neighbors: “Please share with the feds. They care what you think.”

Sure they do.

According to the Times :

“President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday formally requested major tech platforms submit information about the scale of COVID-19 misinformation on social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems.

“The request for information from the surgeon general’s office demanded tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The notice asks the companies to submit ‘exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of COVID-19 misinformation,’ as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to, or affected by, the misinformation.

“The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation, including those that engaged in the sale of unproven Covid-19 products, services and treatments.

“‘Technology companies now have the opportunity to be open and transparent with the American people about the misinformation on their platforms,’” Murthy said in an emailed statement. He added: “‘This is about protecting the nation’s health.’”

“Companies have until May 2 to submit the data. Denying requests for information does not carry a penalty, but the notice is the first formal request from the Biden administration of the tech companies to submit COVID-19 misinformation data, according to the surgeon general’s office.

“Six months ago, Murthy used his first formal advisory to the U.S. to deliver a broadside against tech and social media companies, which he accused of not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous health misinformation — especially about COVID-19. He called the misinformation “an urgent threat to public health.”

“The request for information is part of President Biden’s National COVID-⁠19 Preparedness Plan, which the White House detailed on Wednesday and which is a road map for a new stage of the pandemic where COVID-19 causes ‘minimal disruption,’ according to the White House.

“Biden first revealed details of the plan during his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

“In addition to demanding misinformation data from the tech platforms, the surgeon general called on healthcare providers and the public to submit information about how COVID-19 misinformation has negatively influenced patients and communities.

“‘We’re asking anyone with relevant insights — from original research and data sets to personal stories that speak to the role of misinformation in public health — to share them with us,’” Murthy said.”

Meryl Nass, M.D., ABIM, is an internist with special interests in vaccine-induced illnesses, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War illness, fibromyalgia and toxicology.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

March 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Germany prepares to extend the legal basis for containment indefinitely

Long Lauterbach

Health minister Karl Lauterbach caught maskless on a train
eugyppius | March 5, 2022

On 20 March, in just fifteen days, Germany’s Infection Protection Act expires. If nobody does anything, the whole legislative basis of containment will simply disappear. That is how easy a freedom day could be in Germany, and with the entire attention of the press on Ukraine, you’d think nothing could be simpler than letting that happen. Alas, Karl Lauterbach is our health minister, and we have the worst government since the war. On 16 February, we learned that the plan was to replace the Infection Protection Act and its “more intrusive protections” with “simple, basic protection measures to contain infections and protect at-risk groups.”

Today, in a very bad interview with the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Lauterbach finally explains what he hopes that these “simple, basic protection measures” will amount to. They are anything but simple or basic:

German states must have the capacity to react early to future waves. This includes mask mandates and contact restrictions. It should be possible to set limits on the size of private meetings and public events, as well as access rules for restaurants, for example [vaccination and testing requirements.]

To this end, we must still have the capacity to implement testing requirements for businesses and public spaces. All these instruments should only be used if they are actually necessary. The state parliaments would then have to determine this.

All of this will remain necessary for a very long time. Lauterbach counts on a summer wave, and a fall wave after that. In fact, he envisions just wave after wave, forever:

Corona will occupy us for a long time, a decade or more. HIV appeared 40 years ago, and it’s still there. We’ll always have to deal with Corona variants, perhaps also dangerous variants. There will also always be outbreaks. That’s what you call the endemic phase. And there will always be a group of people, who are not adequately vaccinated, whose vaccine protection is waning, and for whom the vaccine protection is insufficient, because of weak immune systems.

Always new little problems for the new little Lauterbachs of our government to solve.

This new law will be pushed through parliament with as little discussion as possible. Olaf Scholz’s coalition is supposed to present draft legislation to a parliamentary subcommittee by 16 March. A full vote is then planned for the 18th, preceded by a mere 70 minutes of debate. Two years ago, when the law was first passed, things went much the same way; it was all so urgent, you see. Now the reasons are of course much different. The last thing any member of parliament wants to be, is on the record supporting these indefensible rules and the continued destruction of German society. So the most minute aspects of our everyday will continue to be regulated in relative silence, by unreasonable people, for unattainable ends.

As attention wanders from Corona and the virus becomes less dangerous, other countries have found it convenient to end restrictions. Germany, thanks to Lauterbach, will choose a different path. He’s an unbalanced man of limited mental capacity, who ended up in the cabinet because nobody else wanted to touch the health minister position. For him, a spotlight on Ukraine is an opportunity not to fold up the tables and go away, but to pour more poison into the law. Corona will never end in Germany as long as this man is health minister, because the virus is a very large part of who he is. Before March 2020, Lauterbach was a nobody, but ceaseless freaking out about SARS-2 has turned him into one of Germany’s most prominent politicians.

As long as Lauterbach is allowed to preserve the legal basis for containment, pressure will build on state governments to impose closures every time there is a new Corona headline. Every new variant, every infection spike, every rise in hospitalisations or deaths, will see renewed calls to bring out more masks, more vaccines, more tests, more capacity limits, and more closures. These measures don’t even have to be implemented to do their damage; the mere possibility disrupts business models and future plans. The longer these restrictions hang over us, the more deeply they change every aspect of our social and political existence, from music concerts to Oktoberfest to restaurants to schooling to public transit.

Almost as enraging as the continuation of the containment regime, are the near-total absence of good arguments for it. Future variants won’t matter as much as Lauterbach pretends, because almost all Germans have antibodies of one kind or another. A wealth of respiratory viruses, including many varieties of influenza, surge seasonally every year. Many of them are no more dangerous than SARS-2 is right now, and none of them ever inspired any restrictions. The regulatory regime that Lauterbach hopes to continue has become a bizarre superstition, something approaching a collection of religious observances. They are increasingly removed from any stated goals, from any basis in evidence at all, and even from the expectation that they might do anything. It’s just a habit now, stuff we have to do whenever cases rise, because rising cases mean we have to do this stuff.

If we can’t end this now, we may not be able to end it for years or even decades. That seems at least as great a threat, as events in Ukraine.

March 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Surprise! The Supreme Court Defers to the CIA

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 4, 2022

As longtime readers of my blog know, I have long maintained that it is the national-security branch of the federal government that runs the government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs. The other three branches, while being permitted to have the veneer of running the government, actually operate in support of the national-security branch. 

This is also the thesis set forth in a book that I have long recommended, entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, professor of law at Tufts University.

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in a case involving the CIA provides a perfect example of this phenomenon. 

The case involved a man named Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA accused of being a terrorist as part of its much-vaunted worldwide “war on terrorism.” After taking Zubaydah captive some 20 years ago, the CIA subjected him to brutal torture, including 80 hours of waterboarding, hundreds of hours of live burial, and “rectal rehydration.” It should be pointed out that U.S. officials have never convicted Zubaydah of a crime.

Zubaydah was tortured at CIA “black sites,” such as one that the CIA operated in Poland, one of the former Warsaw Pact countries that was absorbed by NATO. Later, he was transferred to the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s torture and prison center at Guantanamo Bay.

The reason that Zubaydah was tortured was that CIA and Pentagon officials were convinced that he was a high-ranking figure in al Qaeda, which the CIA later concluded was a mistake. Nonetheless, Zubaydah remains incarcerated at Gitmo, where for 20 years the CIA and the Pentagon steadfastly failed to grant him a speedy trial, a right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

Zubaydah filed a legal action seeking to take depositions of two private-sector individuals who served as torturers for the CIA. He wanted them to testify under oath as to everything they did to him. 

The CIA objected, arguing that Zubadah’s legal action should be dismissed on two grounds: (1) The depositions of the two torturers would inevitably reveal the fact that the CIA maintained a black site in Poland, which, the CIA maintains, falls within the state-secrets doctrine that the Supreme Court, in another act of extreme deference, awarded the CIA decades ago; and (2) It would breach a promise that the CIA entered into with Poland to keep their joint dark-side activities secret.

Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, deferred to the CIA and dismissed Zubaydah’s lawsuit. The Court held that “national security” dictated that the CIA would be permitted to keep secret the location of its black sites and the details of its dark-side activities, including torture. It’s just tough luck for victims of CIA and Pentagon torture, kidnapping, rendition, indefinite detention, assassination, and other totalitarian-like dark-side activity. 

Needless to say, if a similar legal action were to be brought in Russia, China, or North Korea — all of which also have national-security state forms of government — the judicial ruling would be the same. In every national-security state, most everyone within the government pays extreme deference to the military-intelligence part of the government and gives them free rein to do whatever they want to people. 

March 5, 2022 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

They lied about everything else, but believe them about this war

By Frederick Edward | TCW Defending Freedom | March 5, 2022

HOW long until we get reports of people pelting Siberian huskies on the street?

Probably not too long. Already there are videos of Russian food shops being vandalised such as this one in Germany.

A friend who runs a Russian language school in Britain has received threats, including that all Russians should leave the UK. That the school employs mostly Ukrainians and the owner’s wife is from Kiev is neither here nor there when you’re caught up in the latest tide of moral righteousness.

Having forgotten utterly about the preoccupations of yesterday – Covid, Partygate (whatever happened to Sue Gray’s report?) – we are now fully at work with our latest, all-consuming passion. War. Lots of it. Each detonation of a mortar round more titillating than the last. I haven’t seen this much unanimity since the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Do you believe what you read in the media? Plucky Ukrainians, incompetent Russians. After a few days, claims that ‘Russia has lost the war’ abound. Stuck in the mud and stranded without fuel. That wars are rarely decided on the opening day seems lost to a world obsessed with only the present moment. There is plenty more time for Ukraine to fall.

But not without additional, unnecessary bloodshed, all encouraged by our politicians and media. Those wishing to volunteer for Kiev are sent away on a bandwagon of positive vibes and profile pictures with superimposed Ukrainian flags. That they are being sent to a probable death is neither here nor there.

The Russians are evil. The West never puts a foot wrong. Ignore the wars of the past – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya – we are geopolitically chaste and without sin. That Ukraine is of approximately zero geostrategic interest to us does not matter. The forward march of Western hubris in its institutional form cannot be impeded.

Why would Nato not just say Ukraine will remain a buffer state? That nation’s entry into the alliance was so clearly a red line for the strategists of Moscow, nevertheless we courted its favour, assuming that being on the ‘right side of history’ would be enough. When Russia finally did invade, our ignorance leads us to throw our hands up and scream ‘bully!’ at Putin. I do not care much for Putin, but it is for the birds to assume that the West is entirely without blame.

Having been systematically lied to about every imaginable topic, I cannot simply buy our government’s line. Warrior Truss, whose unfamiliarity with the geography of the area should set alarm bells ringing, solemnly plays her role as a second-rate Thatcher-at-war. Johnson, who until yesterday was on the ropes of various scandals, is recast as a latter-day Churchill.

We’re fighting for democracy and freedom. Fighting for it in a corrupt eastern European state, cleft in two by a linguistic and ethnic fault line, and whose elites have bought the ear of the American President and his family.

We’re fighting it from the high horses of the West, which has just spent two years imprisoning its own citizens and demanding they undergo forced medical procedures. From the same West which would not dare comment on Trudeau’s totalitarian seizure of the bank accounts of those who dared disagree with him, nor on the dictatorial powers used daily in the Antipodes.

Forget all of that. We are the good guys. They are the bad guys. The world is black and white. We are not to blame, not one iota. Cheerlead for war and let the stakes get higher. Assume that Russia’s interests are invalid and to be ignored. We’re back to the gilded age of liberal democracies beating the drum of war.

Whatever you do, don’t look back or think about the recent past. Let your minds be firmly occupied by the indulgent orgy of violence, peddled by the same people who conned you so many times before, and who seek to keep us in a perpetual state of crisis. And certainly, never think about the law of unintended consequences.

March 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Jacinda Ardern Orders Vicious Attack on Peaceful Demonstrators in Wellington

21st Century Wire | March 4, 2022

After Canada’s burgeoning fascist regime in Ottawa brutally cracked-down on the historic truckers protest against the Trudeau government’s authoritarian vaccine mandates, other World Economic Forum acolytes saw this as a signal to crush peaceful protests around the world.

One of the more brutal ‘clean-up’ operations was ordered by New Zealand’s embattled Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

The BFD reports…

If she was prepared to use violence on the steps of parliament then she would be prepared to use it anywhere.

Yesterday was the dawning of a new more violent era by the Ardern regime. The tyrant deployed the strong arm of her jackbooted Police thugs, who used tear gas, pepper spray, batons, riot shields, rubber bullets, sonic weapons and fire hoses on peaceful protestors on the grounds of Parliament. […]

Never before have I been so angry at a tyrannical government. I will do everything within my power to see the end of every party currently in parliament.

This is all on them. They should all be ashamed, but I suspect they will go full Biden and claim that the sanctity of parliament has been desecrated. The tyrant has already done that but, like dutiful lickspittles, so will all the others.

March 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Most Kids Are Already Naturally Immune to COVID. So Why Are We Vaccinating Them?

The Defender | March 1, 2022

The “majority” of children in the U.S. have already been infected with COVID-19, The Washington Post today reported, after reviewing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The Post’s report begs the question: If so many kids have natural immunity to the virus, and, as reported Monday, the vaccines aren’t very effective in children 5 to 11 years old, why are public health officials, schools, businesses and others pushing to vaccinate kids?

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

During a security conference in Munich on Feb. 18, Bill Gates said:

“Sadly, the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicron, is [a] type of vaccine — that is, it creates both B cell and T cell immunity — and it’s done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.”

Did Gates actually admit natural immunity to Omicron is succeeding where vaccines have failed — and that he’s “sad” about that?

Gates isn’t the only one talking about natural immunity these days.

Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research last month argued for including an option of natural immunity in the definition of “fully vaccinated.”

Even vaccine advocate Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, is going to bat for recognizing natural immunity to COVID.

During a Jan. 25 interview, Offit described a meeting with Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy where Offit was asked, along with three others, whether he thought natural immunity should count as a vaccine.

Offit and one other person said yes, natural immunity should count. But they were out-voted, leading U.S. health officials to decide natural immunity should not be recognized in the U.S, as an alternative to a vaccine mandate.

To this day, the CDC maintains this position in its official guidance for the public — despite the agency’s own studies showing natural immunity against COVID is superior to the immunity provided by COVID vaccines.

Some U.S. lawmakers think the CDC is wrong, as evidenced by the introduction of two the Natural Immunity Is Real Act in the Senate (S.2846) and the House (H.R. 5590).

The bills would require “all federal agencies to acknowledge and consider natural immunity to COVID-19 when promulgating any regulation related to the COVID-19 public health emergency.

But for now, in the U.S. at least, those states, businesses and schools requiring “proof of COVID vaccination” make no exceptions for people — including kids — who recovered from COVID, and therefore have natural immunity.

UK data show most unvaccinated kids already have natural immunity

Unfortunately, the CDC doesn’t provide up-to-date seroprevalence data for children in the U.S., but UK data may shed light on children and natural immunity.

The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) early last month reported these data based on population sampling:

“In the week beginning 10 January 2022, the percentage who would have tested positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 ranged from 90.2% to 93.3% for children aged 12 to 15 years and from 63.3% to 72.7% for those aged 8 to 11 years across the UK. Estimates show the percentage of children testing positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 at or above 42 ng/ml.”

In the UK, vaccines have not yet been made available for the under 12 age group (except those who are at very high risk). The 63.3 to 72.7% is thus overwhelmingly due to natural immunity and not vaccination.

Also, as noted by the ONS, individuals testing below the threshold level may also have natural immunity, presumably in the form of T cells and B cells, where the antibodies have waned. Thus these data may be underestimates of the true population-level immunity.

The UK government had previously reported:

“It is estimated that over 85% of all children aged 5 to 11 will have had prior SARS-CoV-2 infection by the end of January 2022 with roughly half of these infections due to the Omicron variant. Natural immunity arising from prior infection will contribute towards protection against future infection and severe disease.”

The UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) on Dec. 22, 2021, authorized the vaccine only for high-risk children ages 5 to 11.

Yet despite the encouraging data on natural immunity in this age group, the JCVI on Feb. 16, in updated guidance, expanded its recommendations to include a “non-urgent offer” of the vaccine to children who are not in a clinical risk group.

To be clear, the UK government authorized an mRNA vaccine for the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, to be made available in April, to a group of 5 million young healthy children — 85% or more of whom are expected to have natural immunity.

As John Campbell, Ph.D., said, if and when a future COVID wave ever comes, any possible beneficial effect from these shots will likely have waned.

Studies may explain why children are protected from SARS-COV2

A study in 2020 reported that cross cellular immunity and immunomodulation from previous existing childhood vaccines may provide protection against COVID infections.

A more recent study of children as young as 3 years old measured spike-specific T cell responses and found they were twice as high as those in adults. The authors suggested this is in part due to pre-existing cross-reactive responses to seasonal coronaviruses.

A January 2022 study demonstrated a protective effect from high levels of pre-existing immune cells generated by other coronaviruses like the common cold, which attack the proteins within the virus (nucleocapsid), rather than the spike protein on the virus.

According to the senior author of the study:

“The spike protein is under intense immune pressure from vaccine-induced antibodies which drives evolution of vaccine escape mutants. In contrast, the internal proteins targeted by the protective T cells we identified mutate much less.

“Consequently, they are highly conserved between the various SARS-CoV-2 variants, including omicron. This suggests that the existing cross-reactive T cells may provide better protection than an mRNA vaccine that focuses only on the original variant spike protein.”

Despite these studies, the latest data on how many children likely have immunity because they’ve recovered from COVID and the well-established scientific theory that natural immunity to a pathogen is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, places like New York City continue to demand proof of vaccination for all children age 5 and over in order for them to participate in extracurricular school activities, visit museums, zoos, theaters, gyms, and restaurants.

For the most comprehensive list of 150 research articles on natural immunity visit the Brownstone Institute.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

March 3, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

WHO moving forward on GLOBAL vaccine passport program

Tech giants and US gov’t co-operate on “SMART Health Cards”, and their use is spreading across the US… & maybe the world.

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | March 1, 2022

Countries all over the world are totally scrubbing their Covid measures, mask mandates and social distancing rules.

The CDC has changed their guidance on vaccine doses, and said people don’t need to wear masks anymore. Boris has done the same, and (some) of the UK’s emergency powers are going to expire soon.

It seems like Covid is over, and the good guys won, right?

Well, not exactly.

The pandemic narrative may be fading away, but certainly not without a trace. Covid might be dying, but vaccine passports are still very much alive.

This week, while the eyes of the world are fixed on Ukraine and the next wave of propaganda, the World Health Organization is launching an initiative to create a “trust network” on vaccination and international travel.

According to a report in Politico published last week:

WHO making moves on international vaccine ‘passport’”

The article quotes Brian Anderson, co-founder of the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which describes itself as:

a voluntary coalition of public and private organizations committed to empowering individuals with access to verifiable clinical information including a trustworthy and verifiable copy of their vaccination records in digital or paper form using open, interoperable standards.

They are, to take the PR agency sheen off this phrase, a corporate/government joint project researching and promoting digital medical identification papers.

In short, vaccine passports.

The VCI has existed since January 2021, and its list of “members” is very revealing, including Google, Amazon, dozens of insurance companies, hospitals, “bio-security firms” and seemingly every major university in the US.

It’s run by a steering committee made up of representatives from Apple, Microsoft, the MAYO Clinic and the MITRE Corporation, a multi-billion-dollar government-funded research organization.

Anderson – who was an employee of MITRE before founding the VCI – tells Politico that the current system of international travel and vaccine records is:

piecemeal, not coordinated and done nation to nation… It can be a real challenge.”

Discussion of an international “Pandemic Treaty” gets underway today in Geneva, and any eventual agreement will doubtless include provisions on the matter of international vaccine certification.

If the VCI is involved – and with their backers, they doubtless will be – any international system will likely be based on their SMART Health Cards system.

SMART CARDS IN THE US – A COVERT FEDERAL VACCINE PASSPORT

VCI’s SMART Health Cards are the dominant tech in the emerging field of biosurveillance and “inoculation certification”. They are already implemented by 25 different US states, plus Puerto Rico and DC, and have become the US’s de-facto national passport

According to this article from Forbes (a puff piece which is little more than an advertisement):

While the United States government has not issued a federal digital vaccine pass, a national standard has nevertheless emerged.

They use the word “emerged” as if it’s a natural, organic process. But it’s not.

The US government, unlike many European countries, has not issued their own official vaccine passport, knowing such a move would rankle with the more Libertarian-leaning US public, not to mention get tangled in the question of state vs federal law.

The SMART cards allow them to sidestep this issue. They are technically only implemented by each state individually via agreements with VCI, which is technically a private entity.

However, since the SMART cards are indirectly funded by the US government, their implementation across every state makes them a national standard in all but name.

The Politico article repeats the claim the US has no national system, adding that the US doesn’t have a federal vaccine database either:

The Biden administration has said it wouldn’t issue digital credentials and hasn’t rolled out standards for vaccine credentials it said it would issue. Complicating the situation is that the U.S. doesn’t have a national inoculation database.

The propaganda message here is underlining what the government doesn’t have and doesn’t know. The suggestion being that the SMART system is totally separate from the government, that it’s a private company that would never share your medical records with the state.

But only the terminally naive would believe that.

SMART Health Cards are run by VCI, which was created by the MITRE Corporation, which is funded by the United States government.

If you give SMART access to your medical records, you’d better believe the US government and its agencies will get their hands on them. They might not have their own database, but they would have access to MITRE’s database when and if they needed or wanted it.

And so would Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

That’s how private-public partnerships work. Symbiosis.

Corporate giants serve as fronts for government programs and, in return, they get a big cut of the profits, bailouts if they’re needed, and regulatory “reforms” that cripple their smaller competitors.

We’ve seen this social media already.

Quasi-monopolies like Facebook and Twitter harvest data for the government and censor anyone they are told to, then they are rewarded with “regulation” that barely hurts them whilst targeting smaller companies such as Gab, Parler or Telegram.

The Smart Health Cards clearly fall into this model.

Microsoft, Google et al. take government money to help create the tech, they then run the program, harvest and store the data, and make it available to the government when they want it.

This allows the federal government to “truthfully” claim not to be implementing a federal passport system, OR keeping a vaccination database, all the while they are sub-contracting tech giants to do it for them.

This system of backdoor government surveillance via corporate veneer is already spreading across the US, and it looks like it will play some part in any future “pandemic treaty” too.

They may have stopped talking about Covid for now, but they got a good chunk of what they wanted out of it.

And if they don’t get the rest of what they want out of the war in Ukraine, they’ll just bring Covid back.

March 2, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Public Health Erred on the Side of Catastrophe

In a coercive mass experiment, governments opened a Pandora’s box of harms

By Brian McGlinchey | February 21, 2022

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, proponents of lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates and other coercive government interventions have characterized these measures as benevolently “erring on the side of caution.”

Now, as the grim toll of those public health measures comes into ever-sharper focus, it’s increasingly clear those characterizations were terribly wrong.

What’s less readily apparent, however, is how the very use of the “erring on the side of caution” framing was injurious in itself—by thwarting reasoned debate of public health policies, diverting attention from unintended consequences, and buffering the Covid regime’s architects from accountability.

To understand how the misuse of “erring on the side of caution” performed a sort of mass hypnosis that coaxed populations into two years of submission to disastrous, overreaching policies, consider how the expression is typically used.

In everyday life, one might err on the side of caution by:

  • Leaving for the airport an extra 30 minutes early
  • Carrying an umbrella when there’s a 25% chance of rain
  • Opting for a less-challenging ski slope
  • Going back into the house to make sure the iron is unplugged
  • Getting a second medical opinion

Generally speaking, “erring on the side of caution” in everyday life means lowering risk with a precaution that has a negligible cost.

When mandate proponents portrayed their edicts as “erring on the side of caution,” it had the effect of tacitly assuring the public—and themselves—that there’d be little or no harm associated with extreme measures like:

  • Shutting down businesses for months at a time
  • Knowingly forcing millions of people into unemployment
  • Halting in-person attendance at schools and colleges
  • Ordering people of all ages and risk profiles to wear masks
  • Denying people opportunities to socialize, recreate and enjoy living

That implicit low-downside assurance not only fostered unthinking support for draconian measures among citizens and experts alike, it also cultivated an atmosphere of intolerance toward those who questioned the wisdom of these interventions and predicted the great many harms that have resulted.

“Overconfident, unnuanced messaging conditioned us to assume that all dissenting opinions are misinformation rather than reflections of good faith disagreement or differing priorities,” write Rutgers professors Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson in their essay, The Mask Debacle. “In doing so, elites drove out scientific research that might have separated valuable interventions from the less valuable.”

Of course, in addition to its implicit assurance that a risk-reduction measure comes at little cost, “erring on the side of caution” conveys an assumption that the precaution will actually be effective.

That hasn’t been the case with Covid mandates. Though many continue embracing the illusion of government control over Covid, the contrary studies and real-world observations are stacking far too high to be denied any longer by the intellectually honest among us.

Charts via Ian Miller at Unmasked

Public Health Threw Out the Playbook and Threw Pandora’s Box Wide Open

The masses who’ve chanted “I trust science,” as they praise each government intervention and idolize those who impose them, are likely unaware that, before Covid-19, the well-considered scientific consensus was against lockdowns, broad quarantines and masking outside of hospital settings—particularly for a virus like Covid-19 that has a 99% survival rate for most age groups.

For example, a 2006 paper published by the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—focusing on mitigation measures against another contagious respiratory illness, pandemic influenza—reads like a warning label against many of the policies inflicted on humanity in the face of Covid-19:

  • “There is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals. The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences… are likely to be considerable.”
  • “Widespread closures [of schools, restaurants, churches, recreations centers, etc] would almost certainly have serious adverse social and economic effects.”
  • “The ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets bearing influenza virus… There are few data available to support the efficacy of N95 or surgical masks outside a healthcare setting. N95 masks need to be fit-tested to be efficacious.”

The point of that and other pre-2020 research into pandemic mitigation was to be prepared, in times of crisis, with policies that reflected a well-reasoned and dispassionate weighing of costs and benefits.

However, when the pandemic arrived, panicking public health officials and academics threw out the playbook and took their policy inspiration from the government that was first to confront the virus. Sadly for the world, that was communist China.

The breadth of the resulting harms from the ensuing plunge into public health authoritarianism is staggering. Far from erring on the side of caution…

Public health erred on the side of a mental health crisis. Anxiety and depression have surged, particularly among adolescents and young adults, where symptoms have doubled during the pandemic.

“I have never been as busy in my life and I’ve never seen my colleagues as busy,” New York psychiatrist Valentine Raiteri told CNBC. “I can’t refer people to other people because everybody is full.”

Public health erred on the side of juvenile suicide attempts. In the summer of 2020, emergency room visits for potential suicides by children leapt over 22% compared to the summer of 2019.

Public health erred on the side of drug overdoses. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, overdose deaths surged 30% in 2020 to a record-high of more than 93,000. Among the factors cited: social isolation, people using drugs alone, and decreased access to treatment.

Public health erred on the side of auto fatalities. Traffic deaths had been on a general downtrend since the 60s, reaching a near-record low in 2019. However, even with shutdown-lightened traffic, deaths jumped 17.5% in the summer of 2020 compared to 2019, and kept rising into 2021.

Blame increased drug and alcohol use, along with psychological fallout from people being denied life’s fundamental pleasures. University of Texas cognitive scientist Art Markman told The New York Times that anger and aggression behind the wheel in part reflects “two years of having to stop ourselves from doing things that we’d like to do.”

Public health erred on the side of domestic violence. A review of 32 studies found an increase in domestic violence around the world, with the increases most intense during the first week of lockdowns. “The home confinement led to constant contact between perpetrators and victims, resulting in increased violence and decreased reports,” the researchers found.

Public health erred on the side of riots, arson and looting. It’s my own conviction that 2020’s eruption of summer violence following a Minneapolis police officer’s callous homicide of George Floyd was greatly magnified by the period of forced mass confinement that preceded it.

Floyd’s death was a match dropped into a tinderbox of humanity confined to veritable house arrest. People blocked from restaurants and bars were suddenly granted a societal waiver to venture out into enormous crowds, where they found excitement, socialization and, far too often, a senselessly destructive means of venting months of pent-up energy, anxiety and frustration. It stands as the costliest civil unrest episode in American history.

Public health erred on the side of confining people where the virus is transmitted most. Lockdowns ordered people away from workplaces, schools, restaurants and bars and into their homes, where New York contract tracers found 74% of Covid spread was happening, compared to just 1.4% in bars and restaurants and even less in schools and workplaces.

Public health erred on the side of obesity. According to the CDC, “the risk of severe COVID-19 illness increases sharply with higher BMI [Body Mass Index].” So what happens when public health “experts” shut down schools, workplaces and recreation options and told people to stay home to stay “safe”?

The CDC found that, in 2020, the rate by which BMI increased among 2- to 19-year olds doubled. Another study found that 48% of adults gained weight during the pandemic, with those who were already overweight most likely to add even more. Among other factors, the study pointed to psychological distress and having schoolchildren at home.

Public health erred against fresh air, exercise and Vitamin D. Governments raced to shut down playgrounds, basketball courts and other outdoor recreation facilities. In a move that’s profoundly emblematic of heavy-handed, counterproductive authoritarianism in the age of Covid, the city of San Clemente, California filled a skate park with 37 tons of sand.

Public health erred on the side of impaired child development. “We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic,” say the authors of a study from Paediatric Emergency Research in the UK and Ireland (PERUKI).

“Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated [with the] COVID-19 pandemic [are] significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”

Public health erred on the side of learning loss. Children are less vulnerable to Covid-19 than they are to the flu, and rarely transmit it to teachers. Unfortunately, American public health officials and teacher unions prevailed in halting in-person instruction (and socialization) in favor of “remote learning.”

It was a poor substitute that fell hardest on the youngest learners. For example, according to curriculum and assessment provider Amplify, the percentage of first-graders scoring at or above the goals for their grade in mid-school-year dropped from 58% before the pandemic to just 44% this year.

Public health erred on the side of pointlessly masking schoolchildren. When schools did open, mask mandates abounded—despite children’s relative invulnerability to the virus and the documented rarity of in-school transmission. A Spanish study showed no discernible difference in transmission among 5-year-olds—who aren’t required to mask—and 6 year olds, who are.

“Masking is a psychological stressor for children and disrupts learning. Covering the lower half of the face of both teacher and pupil reduces the ability to communicate,” wrote Neeraj Sood, director of the Covid Initiative at USC, and Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford. “Positive emotions such as laughing and smiling become less recognizable, and negative emotions get amplified. Bonding between teachers and students takes a hit.”

“Most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity or trajectory of the virus,” writes University of California associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics Vinay Prasad. “The loss to children remains difficult to capture in hard data, but will likely become clear in the years to come.”

Public health erred on the side of giving masked people a false sense of security. As I wrote in August, “Covid-19 particles are astoundingly small. Hard as it is to imagine, the imperceptible gaps in surgical masks can be 1,000 times the size of a viral particle. Gaps in cloth masks are well larger.” That’s to say nothing of the respirated air that simply goes around the mask’s edges.

Earlier in the pandemic, questioning cloth masks triggered outrage and swift social media censorship. Now, even mandate-happy CNN medical analyst Leanna Wen has declared they’re “little more than facial decorations.” Mask skepticism is sprouting elsewhere in mainstream media; the Washington Post and Bloomberg even published an essay titled “Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference Anyway.”

Chart via Ian Miller at Unmasked

When public health officials exaggerated the power of masks, they did more than promote pointless discomfort and a dystopian way of life. “Naively fooled to think that masks would protect them, some older high-risk people did not socially distance properly, and some died from Covid-19 because of it,” said epidemiologist, biostatistician and former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff.

Public health erred on the side of killing small businesses. Thanks in large part to government’s targeting of so-called “non-essential businesses,” the first year of the pandemic brought an additional 200,000 business closures over prior levels.

Public health erred on the side of harming women’s careers. Women comprise a greater proportion of the sectors hid hardest by lockdowns, and the closing of schools and child care centers prompted many more women than men to put their careers on hold.

Public health erred on the side of inflation. To offset the massive economic destruction inflicted by public health shutdowns, the federal government plunged into an astounding spending spree, handing out cash to individuals, businesses and city and state governments.

It was money the government didn’t have, so the Federal Reserve essentially created it out of thin air. Pushing all that new fiat money into circulation debases the currency, fueling today’s surging price inflation—which is a stealth tax with no maximum rate, which hits poor people hardest.

Note: Lockdowns and other mandates weren’t the exclusive driver of many of the various harms I’ve described; general fear of the virus also contributed to some of them. However, it should also be noted that public health officials—and media that overwhelmingly emphasized negative stories—whipped up a level of fear that led people to overstate the level of danger actually posed by the virus.

There’s one more way in which characterizing lockdowns and other mandates as “erring on the side of caution” plays a psychological trick: Since the phrase is embedded with the notion of good intentions, it conditions citizens to be forgiving of the bureaucrats and politicians who imposed them.

Note, however, that in most everyday usage of “erring on the side of caution,” the choice to “err” is made voluntarily by individuals who bear the consequences of their own decisions—or by others, like an airplane pilot or a surgeon, to whom we’ve voluntarily and unmistakably granted control of our well-being.

The grim impacts of lockdowns and other mandates, however, were coercively imposed on society, to say nothing of the fact that so many of the edicts represented gross usurpations of power and violations of human rights.

On top of all that, the edicts were reinforced by Orwellian censorship and ostracism leveled at those who dared raise questions that have now proven valid.

So make no mistake: Overreaching public health officials and politicians—and the journalists-in-name-only who served as their mindless, unquestioning megaphones—have fully earned our withering condemnation. Indeed, holding them accountable is essential to sparing ourselves and future generations from repeating this dystopian chapter of human history.

March 2, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Papua New Guinea’s pandemic leadership is an inspiration to us all

Harry Dougherty Blog | February 24, 2022

When I find myself arguing with pro mandate Australians in social media comment sections (tragic, I know) I get the impression that they desperately want the last couple of years they’ve squandered to have been worthwhile.

Australia’s official Covid19 death rate happens to be low by international standards, which makes it easier for the Dan Andrews fanboys to delude themselves that the sick cruelty they inflicted on their fellow citizens was justified.

For a recap, this cruelty includes but is not limited to:

  • Prolonged mass house arrest
  • Vaccine Passports
  • Vaccine injuries and deaths in individuals (often young and not at serious risk from Covid) who were coerced into getting it.
  • The four newborn babies in South Australia who died after domestic Covid19 travel restrictions prevented them from being transferred for specialist life-saving emergency treatment in Victoria.
  • In Western Australia, the prevention of unvaccinated parents from visiting their sick children in hospital.

If I was Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, (that snivelling, gaslighting, modern-day Pontius Pilate), I would not want to admit that pointlessly I stole two years of quality life from my citizens and presided over state policies that killed people,

“Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic,… together we have achieved one of the lowest death rates in the world,” he says.

Achieved? Everywhere in the Oceania region has a low death rate by global standards. When will Papua New Guinea’s PM be praised for his inspirational leadership? Don’t hold your breath, but PNG is Australia’s immediate neighbour, (and the only other country on Earth with kangaroos), yet has a lower Covid19 death rate than does oz.

Could that be because of the success of PNG’s vaccination rollout? Did they her the sheep through the gate, so to speak?

Vaccination rate for Australia (at least one dose): 85%

Vaccination rate for PNG (at least one dose): 3.4%

Since we are only allowed to compare Sweden with its neighbours, it’s only fair that the same rules must apply to everyone. I assume vaccine passports aren’t really a thing in PNG. But they seem to be coping without them.

Covid19 deaths per million for Australia: 193/1M

Covid19 deaths per million for PNG: 69/1M

Most countries in Europe have relatively high death rates, though the few nations that had extremely low death rates (Norway and Finland) did not have the strictest measures. Lockdown rejecting Sweden’s death rate is firmly in Europe’s lower half.

At present, the UK is the least restricted country in Europe, possibly in the developed world and has been since July 2021, yet our (questionably recorded) Covid19 death rate is only the 22nd highest in Europe, currently slightly lower than that of Italy, which has vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, and surgical masks remain compulsory.

What would Australia’s death rate be were it somehow squeezed into the North Atlantic or continental Europe? We cannot know.

March 2, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

The Nudge: Ethically Dubious and Ineffective

BY GARY SIDLEY | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | MARCH 1, 2022

More and more people in the US will be wising up to their government’s use of behavioural science – or ‘nudging’ – as a means of increasing compliance with Covid-19 restrictions. These psychological techniques exploit the fact that human beings are almost always on ‘automatic pilot,’ habitually making moment-by-moment decisions without rational thought or conscious reflection.

The use of behavioural science in this way represents a radical departure from the traditional methods – legislation, information provision, rational argument – used by governments to influence the behaviour of their citizens. But why expend all that time and energy when, by contrast, many of the ‘nudges’ delivered are – to various degrees – acting upon the public automatically, below the level of conscious thought and reason?

By going with the grain of how we think and act, the state-employed ‘nudgers’ can covertly shape our behaviour in a direction deemed desirable by the regime of the day – an appealing prospect for any government. The ubiquitous deployment of these behavioural strategies – which frequently rely on inflating emotional distress to change behaviour – raises profound moral questions.

The UK has been an innovator in these methods, but they are now raising widespread disquiet here. In fact serious concerns about our Government’s use of behavioural science were previously raised in relation to other spheres of government activity. In 2019, a Parliamentary report found that the distress evoked in people targeted by behavioural insights in relation to tax collection may, in some instances, have led to victims taking their own lives.

In the Covid-19 era, it appears the behavioural scientists have been given free reign. As a retired consultant clinical psychologist, I – and 39 professionals from the psychology/therapy/mental health sphere – have become so concerned we are calling on the UK Parliament to formally investigate the government’s use of behavioural science. People across the world can glean from the UK experience what may also have been done to them, and what may be next.

The Behavioural Insights Team

The appetite for using covert psychological strategies as a means of changing people’s behaviour was boosted by the emergence of the ‘Behavioural Insights Team’ (BIT) in 2010 as ‘the world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural science to policy.’ The membership of BIT rapidly expanded from a seven-person unit embedded in the UK Government to a ‘social purpose company’ operating in many countries across the world. A comprehensive account of the psychological techniques recommended by the BIT is provided in the document, MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy, where the authors claim that their strategies can achieve ‘low cost, low pain ways of nudging citizens … into new ways of acting by going with the grain of how we think and act.’

Since its inception in 2010, the BIT has been led by Professor David Halpern who is currently the team’s chief executive. Professor Halpern and two other members of the BIT also currently sit on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), which advises the Government on its Covid-19 communications strategy. Most of the other members of the SPI-B are prominent UK psychologists who have expertise in the deployment of behavioural-science ‘nudge’ techniques.

‘Nudges’ of concern: fear inflation, shaming, peer pressure

The BIT and the SPI-B have encouraged the deployment of many techniques from behavioural science within the UK Government’s Covid-19 communications. However, there are three ‘nudges’ which have evoked most alarm: the exploitation of fear (inflating perceived threat levels), shame (conflating compliance with virtue) and peer pressure (portraying non-compliers as a deviant minority) – or “affect,” “ego” and “norms,” to use the language of the MINDSPACE document.

Affect and Fear

Aware that a frightened population is a compliant one, a strategic decision was made to inflate the fear levels of all the UK people. The minutes of the SPI-B meeting dated the 22nd of March 2020 stated, ‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent’ by ‘using hard-hitting emotional messaging.’ Subsequently, in tandem with the UK’s subservient mainstream media, the collective efforts of the BIT and the SPI-B have inflicted a prolonged and concerted scare campaign upon the UK public. The methods used have included:

– Daily statistics displayed without context: the macabre mono focus on showing the number of Covid-19 deaths without mention of mortality from other causes or the fact that, under normal circumstances, around 1,600 people die each day in the UK.

– Recurrent footage of dying patients: images of the acutely unwell in Intensive Care Units.

– Scary slogans: for example, ‘IF YOU GO OUT YOU CAN SPREAD IT, PEOPLE WILL DIE,’ typically accompanied by frightening images of emergency personnel in masks and visors.

Ego and Shame

We all strive to maintain a positive view of ourselves. Utilising this human tendency, behavioural scientists have recommended messaging that equates virtue with adherence to the Covid-19 restrictions and subsequent vaccination campaign. Consequently, following the rules preserves the integrity of our egos while any deviation evokes shame. Examples of these nudges in action include:

– Slogans that shame the non-compliant: for example, ‘STAY HOME, PROTECT THE NHS, SAVE LIVES.’

– TV advertisements: actors tell us, ‘I wear a face covering to protect my mates’ and ‘I make space to protect you.’

– Clap for Careers: the pre-orchestrated weekly ritual, purportedly to show appreciation for NHS staff.

– Ministers telling students not to ‘kill your gran.’

– Shame-evoking adverts: close-up images of acutely unwell hospital patients with the voice-over, ‘Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you’re doing all you can to stop the spread of coronavirus?’

Norms and Peer Pressure

Awareness of the prevalent views and behaviour of our fellow citizens can pressurise us to conform, and knowledge of being in a deviant minority is a source of discomfort. The UK Government repeatedly encouraged peer pressure throughout the Covid-19 crisis to gain the public’s compliance with their escalating restrictions, an approach that – at higher levels of intensity – can morph into scapegoating.

The most straightforward example is how, during interviews with the media, Government ministers often resorted to telling us that the vast majority of people were ‘obeying the rules’ or that almost all of us were conforming.

However, in order to enhance and sustain normative pressure, people need to be able to instantly distinguish the rule breakers from the rule followers; the visibility of face coverings provides this immediate differentiation. The switch to the mandating of masks in community settings in summer 2020, without the emergence of new and robust evidence that they reduce viral transmission, strongly suggests that the mask requirement was introduced primarily as a compliance device to harness normative pressure.

Ethical questions

Compared to a government’s typical tools of persuasion, the covert psychological strategies outlined above differ in both their nature and subconscious mode of action. Consequently, there are three main areas of ethical concern associated with their use: problems with the methods per se; problems with the lack of consent; and problems with the goals to which they are applied.

First, it is highly questionable whether a civilised society should knowingly increase the emotional discomfort of its citizens as a means of gaining their compliance. Government scientists deploying fear, shame, and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China, where the state inflicts pain on a subset of its population in an attempt to eliminate beliefs and behavior they perceive to be deviant.

Another ethical issue associated with these covert psychological techniques relates to their unintended consequences. Shaming and scapegoating have emboldened some people to harass those unable or unwilling to wear a face covering. More disturbingly, the inflated fear levels will have significantly contributed to the many thousands of excess non-Covid deaths that have occurred in people’s homes, the strategically-increased anxieties discouraging many from seeking help for other illnesses.

Furthermore, a lot of older people, rendered housebound by fear, may have died prematurely from loneliness. Those already suffering with obsessive-compulsive problems about contamination, and patients with severe health anxieties, will have had their anguish exacerbated by the campaign of fear. Even now, after all the vulnerable groups in the UK have been offered vaccination, many of our citizens remain tormented by ‘COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome’), characterised by a disabling combination of fear and maladaptive coping strategies.

Second, a recipient’s consent prior to the delivery of a medical or psychological intervention is a fundamental requirement of a civilised society. Professor David Halpern explicitly recognised the significant ethical dilemmas arising from the use of influencing strategies that impact subconsciously on the country’s citizens. The MINDSPACE document – of which Professor Halpern is a co-author – states that, ‘Policymakers wishing to use these tools … need the approval of the public to do so’ (p74).

More recently, in Professor Halpern’s book, Inside the Nudge Unit, he is even more emphatic about the importance of consent: ‘If Governments … wish to use behavioural insights, they must seek and maintain the permission of the public. Ultimately, you – the public, the citizen – need to decide what the objectives, and limits, of nudging and empirical testing should be’ (p375).

As far as we are aware, no attempt has ever been made to obtain the UK public’s permission to use covert psychological strategies.

Third, the perceived legitimacy of using subconscious ‘nudges’ to influence people may also depend upon the behavioural goals that are being pursued. It may be that a higher proportion of the general public would be comfortable with the government resorting to subconscious nudges to reduce violent crime as compared to the purpose of imposing unprecedented and non-evidenced public-health restrictions. Would UK citizens have agreed to the furtive deployment of fear, shame and peer pressure as a way of levering compliance with lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccination? Maybe they should be asked before the government considers any future imposition of these techniques.

A truly independent and comprehensive evaluation of the ethics of deploying psychological ‘nudges’ – during public health campaigns and in other areas of government – is now urgently required, not only in Britain, but in all countries where these interventions have been used.

Dr Gary Sidley is a retired consultant clinical psychologist who worked in the UK’s National Health Service for over 30 years, a member of HART Group and a founder member of the Smile Free campaign against forced masking.

March 1, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Czechs Could Face 3 Years in Prison For Supporting Russia on Social Media

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | March 1, 2022

People in the NATO-member state of Czechia have been warned that they could face up to three years in prison if they express support for Russia on social media.

Yes, really.

The country’s Attorney General Igor Stríž announced in a press release that it was “necessary to inform citizens that the current situation associated with the Russian Federation’s attack on Ukraine may have implications for their freedom of expression.”

The limitations are being imposed under the umbrella of criminal code measures that make it a crime to approve a criminal offence or deny, question, approve or justify genocide.

“[F]reedom of speech also has its limits in a democratic state governed by the rule of law,” asserted Stríž, announcing that anyone who “publicly (including at demonstrations, on the Internet or on social networks) agreed (accepted or supported the Russian Federation’s attacks on Ukraine) or expressed support or praised the leaders of the Russian Federation in this regard, they could also face criminal liability under certain conditions.”

The official Czech Police website also announced that they were “closely monitoring” the content of “dozens of comments in internet discussions approving the Russian invasion and the activities of the Russian army.”

According to a report by Radio Prague International, someone found in breach of the criminal code could be imprisoned for up to three years, although it would be difficult to bring charges.

Breitbart’s Jack Montgomery asked if “someone might be open to prosecution for merely questioning NATO’s eastward expansion, the West’s decision to back the Euromaidan coup in 2014, or the extent to which claims the Ukrainian government has mistreated civilians in Donbas might be true.”

As we previously highlighted, before the outbreak of war, Czech President Miloš Zeman said Russia would be “crazy” to invade Ukraine.

One wonders how far governments working in cahoots with Big Tech will try to milk the war for more domestic censorship.

Will simply pointing out brazen examples of war propaganda pushed by the pro-NATO political media class also be characterized as ‘Russian disinformation’?

Leftist blue checkmark journalists on Twitter must be licking their lips.

March 1, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

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